Another Mother's Son (2 page)

Ross leans forward as the window slides down. ‘Mum, is it all right if I go home with Jude?'

He peers in at me. He can be polite when he wants something, stubborn as the lid of a vacuum-sealed jar for the rest of the time. It still comes as a surprise that his face above the loosened collar and skewed school tie is no longer round and chubby – though he can put on the unblinking stare of childhood at will. The arc of one eyebrow is visible, the other masked by a mop of reddish fair hair the size of a small cauliflower. With head shaved to the back and sides, he is growing out his former hedgehog haircut selectively.

‘No, it isn't all right. It's a school night. Tuesday. What's the matter with you?'

‘We've got this project.' His voice is adolescent husky.

‘And?'

‘We're supposed to do it in pairs.' He steps back from the car and looks over his shoulder.

‘Well, make a start on it at the weekend.'

His face looms in the window frame again. ‘That's too late, Mum. We need a working plan by tomorrow morning.'

‘Do it by phone.'

‘No-o.' Ross sounds anguished. ‘We need to discuss and Jude's got all this good stuff.'

‘Who is this supposed to be for?' I ask.

‘Mr Chi-ald. That's the trouble.'

‘Mr Child.' I sigh. ‘I met him briefly. He seems—'

‘Thanks, Mum. See you tomorrow.'

I stare into the space he had occupied. I have never heard of Jude. He must be new. There are always fresh faces in Year 12. Lloyd-Barron Academy recruits vigorously for its sixth form. ‘Specialising in Success' is the slogan.

In the driver's mirror, I have an obscure view through the sloping glass of the back windscreen to the cars lined up behind. Here and there streams of light appear as engines and headlamps are switched on. Among them is a car containing Ross and Jude and driven by one of Jude's parents. Alternatively, the story is a pack of lies and my son will shortly be a missing person.

Using repeater triangulation, we locate Ross's mobile number in a rural area in the West Midlands. Since then there has been no roaming signal. That will be £2,000 plus VAT. Please try the repeater triangulation again. Where are the rural areas in the West Midlands?

His photo will appear, smudged and out of focus, on the back pages of the
Big Issue
. Ross never stands still long enough to get a clear print. Like a ballboy on a tennis court, he is poised, ready to move. He is seventeen, not an especially grown-up seventeen; one of the oldest in his year group, which some studies suggest is an educational advantage, though I have yet to see proof of this. He is slighter than Ewan and Oliver were at that age – more of an urchin – but, I assume, capable of looking after himself. I am disinclined to cosset my boys. I have never been a taxi service. All the same, it is odd that I have no idea where and with whom he will be spending the night. The catchment area for Lloyd-Barron Academy is large and extends northwards into the Enfield suburbs as far as the M25.

Having thought that Ross's decision not to wear home clothes was a non-conformity-in-conformity thing, I now realise that he planned to stay away and purposely kept his school uniform on in order to wear it on Wednesday morning. I should have kept saying no. ‘No, no, no' to everything he said. Instead I said, ‘Mr Child.'

I lean across the empty passenger seat and shut the door. I switch on the headlamps and ease the car forward.

THE LIGHTS ARE
off when I return home. I bump against the cardboard cartons that stand stacked in the narrow hall and set a clock inside chiming. I put my bag down. The day's warmth is trapped inside the walls.

This house used to feel like a moving boat when the boys ran in and out of rooms and up and down the stairs. These days it is becalmed. I go up to the half landing, then to the first floor, switching on lights along the way. My sons keep their bedroom doors shut. They close them when they are in situ and also when they leave. The woodwork, defaced by old torn-off stickers in shards of colour, resembles the site of a butterfly massacre. The walls are pitted by missiles launched from catapults.

I continue up to Ewan's room at the top of the house. I do this every day. I appear in the converted loft and tell him bits of news – though I sound to myself like a broadcaster reading from an autocue. If he does not instantly tell me to go away, I wander about, pick up wet towels from the floor, lower or raise the blind, depending on the time of day. I venture as far as the desk and look to see if he has been drawing; adding to the strange, painstaking, intricate designs, spoiled from the start by being executed in biro. I touch his hair.

I no longer ask, Why don't you …? Wouldn't it be a good idea to …? What's the matter? How can I help? Frequently asked questions that are as useless as the kind dreamt up by some minor marketing person for a product website.

I push the door open. Ewan is a mound in the bed. From where I stand, the cocoon of duvet conceals even the top of his head.

‘Hi, darling. Are you OK? Whew! It's hot in here under the roof. Surely you don't need the duvet on. Shall I fetch you a sheet? Crazy weather. Cold and wet all summer and now baking in September. Have you had anything to eat?' I pause. ‘Well, the sixth-form do was boring, as expected, and your brother has disappeared into the night with someone called Jude. Fingers crossed he reappears one day. Oh, since he's not here, you could sleep in his room – or in Oliver's. It will be cooler down there. Why don't you do that?'

My words are normal, the tone bright but less bright than I intend. Too monotonous – too plangent. I am like a musician who becomes note perfect but ceases to breathe life into the sound she makes.

I go down the stairs and along the passage to the kitchen, through the door frame with its jagged gaps where the hinges used to be. I removed the door years ago to stop the interminable banging.

A lamp stands on the sill among dog-eared paperbacks with the shade touching its reflection in the window. I switch it on. Nothing in the house keeps its own space. Objects overlap like memos on a crowded noticeboard.

I write a text to Ross:
This must not happen again
. I erase it and send:
Where are you?

I open the fridge door and look inside, shut it again. The bread bin contains half a granary loaf. I take two slices and slot them into the toaster.

There have been too many parts to the day, each element differentiated and with its own particular hue. All they have in common is myself – and that is not enough to bind them together. On the contrary, my presence obstructs the flow. Deborah Lupton bounces along full of good cheer. She sutures the lives of the twins, the younger Luptons and Mr Lupton, the Lloyd-Barron Academy Parents' Association, the drop-in centre for the over seventies, the Woodcraft Folk – and in the process makes a seamless whole of her own life. Ginny Lu, in a quieter way, is the same. These women are not merely good sorts, they are organising principles. The episodes that make up their days and weeks, whatever the contents, are all stamped by the Lupton/Lu in-house franking machine whereas I scrabble around guessing the correct postage for each and every item. When I get it wrong I imagine a scrawl across the outside of the package indicating the insufficiency or a recommendation that the mail be returned to sender.

I still see myself as a student type, a kind of girl hoodlum, though, apart from the tattoo of a snail shell on my left shoulder and the naturally back-combed hair, that notion hardly stands up. Some wised-up friend said I looked like Patty Hearst and, once I had found out who Patty Hearst was, it pleased me to be linked to someone who had been kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group and taken part in a San Francisco bank robbery. A London girl with a short upper lip and wide-apart eyes, I liked the conjured-up image of glamorous instability and, before the days of Wikipedia, went to the trouble of looking up Stockholm syndrome.

I have an ex-husband, Randal Doig, and an insecure job working as an archivist in the Corporate Archives of Transport for London. I am the mother of three sons. We live together in Dairyman's Road, Palmers Green, in a thirties house with small-paned bay windows up and down, red tiles and a roof light, invisible from the street, that looks slantwise up to the sky.

In my lunch hour, in fine weather, I lie on the grass in St James's Park. The sun feels the same on my skin as it did when I was nineteen, my eyes shut behind a pair of sunglasses.

The toaster emits a sooty smell and switches itself off. The popping-up mechanism has not worked since Ross forced in a whole hot cross bun. I look around for the meat skewer.

MY SONS WERE
all born during John Major's government and I often wonder whether that has had an effect on them. The privatisation of British Rail, the introduction of Sunday trading, the Dangerous Dogs Act, the Cones Hotline, Back to Basics – the tone of that administration seeped into their minds and made them obstructive. As a predictor, someone's birth prime minister must be as good as an astrological sign.
Bonar Law 1922–3: Renowned for your excellent memory and business acumen, you may be depressed at losing your grip. Don't worry. Soon you will be ready for the next step. Try growing a moustache.

Liz Savaris, my best schoolfriend, who now lives in Aberystwyth, does not think much of my theory. Birthwise, we both scraped into Alec Douglas-Home's term of office and so far have not come up with any points of reference, though
The Way the Wind Blows
, the title of A.D.-H.'s autobiography, is sufficiently fatalistic to suit most circumstances. Certainly, my own life has seen the odd twister. I call Liz whenever I need to clamour for sympathy, which she gives wholeheartedly in a real crisis but hardly at all up until that point. I rely on her, in a sense, to gauge the severity of a situation and am almost pleased to be put down because it means that, according to Liz, I am making a fuss about nothing. All kinds of awful things have happened to her and, although she never brings them up in conversation, they hover like warning angels as I prattle on.

Have you started dating? she asked when Ewan gave up university after two terms. Sometimes boys don't like that. Well, there was Richard Watson but … Richard Watson, she shrieked, have you gone mad, Lorna? It's either someone you already know, or a stranger, I said. Both have their pluses and minuses. He works at the Office for Budget Responsibility. But Richard Watson? she said. Ewan wouldn't have known, I said, unless he was a fly on the wall of The Albert in Victoria Street or Richard's grim flat off Fulham Palace Road. Another explanation might be the birth of Stefan, Liz said, referring to my ex-husband's new son. This has all happened so bloody fast – gestation like rats – though the baby would mainly affect Ross, as he is the one who has lost his position. Ewan is still the firstborn. We would have gone off the rails among our own age group, I said. Universities tolerate time-wasters and they have their own counselling services. Why has he come
home
?

The middle son, too drunk on the dark and the mystery of the sea to reply to his mother's messages, or just too drunk, returns from Cornwall in time for me to drive him to Brighton for the start of Freshers' Week. The journey passes without much conversation. Oliver listens to music, and I, who dislike the A23, concentrate on the road. He sits with the passenger seat pushed back in semi-recline. From my sit-up-and-beg position, I see mainly his legs, the tear in his jeans at the knee, and his thumbs as they move over his phone. The clouds are high and grey and gusts of wind buffet the side of the car with hollow sounding thuds.

At one point, Oliver starts talking about wreck tours off the south coast, then, as suddenly as he began, he replaces the earpiece under a lock of blond hair and falls silent again. This leads me to believe that his mind is on diving and that starting university is an irrelevance and not in any way momentous to him. Only time will tell whether he too will return home before or after graduation and live in his bedroom.

As far as I know, Oliver has no girlfriend. He hangs out with a group of friends, and who within that group is paired off with whom I have no idea. He is free. He won't be making those complicated weekend train journeys that Ben Allardyce and I went in for, having ended up in mutually inaccessible university towns. We used to go on three-and-a-half-hour journeys from Colchester to Nottingham, or Nottingham to Colchester, via two quite separate London terminals and sometimes Grantham as well.

I keep my thoughts to myself. They come and go, like traffic flow. It feels peaceful to be in the car occasionally smacked by the wind, Oliver beside me, the tinny beat from his music a constant accompaniment.

London suburban landscape repeats itself. Detached, mansion-sized roadside pubs with banner advertisements for Sunday roast, garden centres flanked by banks of shopping trolleys, superstores, ditto. Glimpsed countryside vanishes as fast as the good parts of dreams. I sing at one point because we are on the road and moving but Oliver catches sight of my lips and gestures to me to cut it out.

We drive towards the South Downs but instead of speeding on towards the sea – the desire for which is quickened by the sight of the coastal hills rising in a long, grey-green line – we turn eastwards at the Patcham interchange, head for the Brighton suburb of Coldean and arrive at the university campus at around midday.

I park the car while Oliver collects a key from the site manager of the halls of residence. As I wait for him to return, I smile at a couple who are lifting a television from the back of their people-carrier while their son yells instructions. More items are removed from the boot. A small fridge, a microwave oven, a rail of clothes. Shadows appear on the tarmac, generous splashes of black, as the sun breaks through cloud.

A girl poses with wide-apart arms and an open-mouthed Hollywood smile by the entrance to the block. Her father aims his phone at her. Another family stands by, luggage piled up beside them, waiting their turn for the celebrity shoot. Out come the phones and cameras. There is something sick-making about photography.